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Mosaic: Blogging or cribbing?

So as I was out browsing today looking for something interesting to blog on, not an easy task. I was amazed by the lack of original content and the almost recursive nature of the blogosphere. One would think being checked out for a week would bring just loads of new ideas, but not so much.  I know that there aren’t a whole bunch of original ideas to begin with, but I tried to find one.

When pondering on the lack of limited new content, I “flashed” on a short story by Jack Lewis, much in the same way the tv character Chuck, on the [tag]nbc[/tag] tv [tag]series[/tag] [tag]Chuck[/tag] flashes on random things due to the intersect, a spy thing. The short story “Who’s cribbing” is about a new science fiction writer finds that all his submitted stories are being rejected because they are copies of those published by another writer in the 1930s and 1940s. He does not understand what is happening. When he finally gathers all his letters and rejection slips and tries to publish that, he is told that this, too, was the work of that other author. The real question is how much original content qualifies as new and original content? I am the blogosphere is like festivus for content.

Slide0005

Technorati is now tracking over 70 million weblogs, and we’re seeing about 120,000 new weblogs being created worldwide each day. That’s about 1.4 blogs created every second of every day. I further noticed that most inbound comments to my blog are not because the article or the other commenters speak to you; you’re commenting on the blog because you hope people will click on your name at the bottom of the comment and visit your own site. CLICK!

Have you ever had that experience where you realize that you actually KNOW something, versus feeling like you’re still learning it? For instance, when you go from having to think which one is a G chord on a guitar and which one is a C (guitar players: did you just flash to a visualization of the positioning?), what does that feel like? That knowing?

Well, we get along as independent and autonomous sovereign human beings in the physical world, and we need to bring that into the virtual world. So we use tools like social networks and blogs as a utility to deliver this sense of[tag] community[/tag]. For example, Twitter enabled me to make new friends. This is the greatest benefit of all. It connected me to people like Greg, Laura, Jim, Michelle, and Chris that I had not known. They have helped me in many ways, but more importantly, they have become friends, and friends are far more important than page views. This social networking stuff is tough work! Content is just plain everywhere, which in turn, as someone trying to blog, has to retain, synthesize, document and spellcheck. Drat!! [tag]Bloom’s taxonomy[/tag] again!

So what’s the effort for? So is it google hits in a query? Pageviews? People following you on Twitter? LinkedIn connections? Feedburner readers? Gosh I hope it’s not feedburner readers, because my 23 readers are probably not that interesting.

I’ll confess I’m not a [tag]Facebook[/tag] user. I have an account as a way of checking it out, but I’ve ‘friended’ very few people. Why? Because if I friend you, especially someone I don’t know, I’m giving you explicit permission to start a fairly intense series of interactions. This makes good commercial sense if you’re an insurance salesman or even a musician looking for gigs, but if you’ve got a limit on the time you can invest, it’s not only time-consuming, it’s a recipe to bitterly disappoint people. It’s that whole synthesis thing which takes so much work.

I force myself to read great blogs outside of my niche, passion and even interest for the same reason. Start email conversations with other bloggers. Develop relationships with journalists in my niche. I’ve been quoted and featured in four stories published in our state newspaper simply because I was blogging in my niche. And then, simply, get some rest. Blogging takes a ton of energy. I think more bloggers could use more rest times of simply sitting on the couch. But a fair amount of bloggers are just out in the field – right? C’mon, [tag]Barcamp[/tag] [tag]Scotland[/tag] 2007 was a brilliant event!

If you’re reading this, chances are, you already know the importance of getting involved in all this online conversation stuff. But it’s worth sharing this advice for wannabe authors which was first shared by Scalzi, it’s really very simple… it’s about what you can bring to the party, not what you can get out of it.

Wish I had time to really blog.

~ Cheers

Sarchasm: The gulf between the author of sarcastic wit and the person who doesn’t get it.

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December 16, 2007 by
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Social Media Contract Theory?

So I got to randomly thinking about social contract theory and how a new equivalent might just be how we use social network sites, groups and “friends” from a behavioral norm perspective which all have implied social constraints. So what is [tag]social contract theory[/tag], from wikipedia:

The term social contract describes a broad class of philosophical theories whose subjects are the implied agreements by which people form nations and maintain a social order. In laymen’s terms, this means that the people give up some rights to a government in order to receive social order. Social contract theory provides the rationale behind the historically important notion that legitimate state authority must be derived from the consent of the governed. The starting point for most of these theories is a heuristic examination of the human condition absent from any social order, termed the “state of nature” or “natural state”. In this state of being, an individual’s action is bound only by his or her conscience. From this common starting point, the various proponents of social contract theory attempt to explain, in different ways, why it is in an individual’s rational self-interest to voluntarily subrogate the freedom of action one has under the natural state (their so called “natural rights”) in order to obtain the benefits provided by the formation of social structures.

So as we participate in social media, there is clearly acceptable and non-acceptable activities, both implicit and explicit. To that end, to register on a social networking site, we all of course have to accept the terms of services, which restricts something/requires giving up some freedom of action or is an explicit set of constructs. Below is an example [tag]TOS[/tag] from [tag]Utterz[/tag] below:

We’re glad you’ve chose to use our Utterz℠ Service, where you can share your voice, your pictures, and your life with your friends and the entire Utterz community.

First and foremost: your privacy is important to us. We won’t share your personal information with anyone.

By using and Utterz Service, you agree to the following terms and conditions:

  1. You must be 13 years of age or older to use Utterz.
  2. It is your responsibility to keep your login and other information private, and you are responsible for any content (sounds, voices, pictures, or any other material) that is posted to Utterz by you or under any of your accounts or cell phone.
  3. You may not use Utterz for any unlawful purposes, including violations of copyright law.
  4. You own all content that you post on Utterz, and by posting any content, you grant Utterz the perpetual, irrevocable, non-exclusive, sublicensable right to display that content in any form on any Utterz Service (whether by phone or over the internet) or anywhere else, without limitation. You also agree that you will only use any Content you view at Utterz for your own personal, non-commercial use.
  5. By posting at Utterz.com, you agree to indemnify and hold harmless Utterz for anything posted on any Utterz Service under your screen name or from your cell phone., or otherwise related to your use of any Utterz Service.
  6. You will not post any content which is offensive, obscene, hateful, or indecent, or which violates the rights of anyone else. You won’t threaten anyone, promote violence or any behavior which would be a civil or criminal offense.
  7. You may not use any Utterz Service to send unwanted email, IM, voice, or text messages to anyone.
  8. You won’t violate any security systems; transmit worms, viruses, or any other malicious code; or do anything destructive to or using any Utterz Service.
  9. Utterz is free to use, but you are responsible for any charges or fees charged by other service providers, like your cell phone carrier or internet service provider.
  10. You give us permission to contact you electronically when we need to.
  11. We can change these Terms of Service in the future if we need to, and by continuing to use any Utterz Service, you agree to any such changes. If any change is “material,” in our sole discretion, we will notify you by email.

We may change or terminate the Utterz Service, at any time or for any reason, without notice. And we may (but we are not obligated to) remove any content posted on any Utterz Service at any time, for any reason.

We reserve the right to terminate your account and right to use any Utterz Service if, in our sole opinion, you violate any of these Terms, or if you do anything else that might harm others or any Utterz Service. We can also refuse to provide access to the Utterz Service to any person, at any time, for any reason….

While the legalese of most of these represent CYA for the service provider, we do agree to forfiet, without warning content created and/or agree to publish within a set of agreed to parameters. So is the ToS a literal social contract? or is the “network members” the author of the new social media contract?

November 11, 2007 by
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So what’s the social networking “bench”?

So I’m back to that Bob book again – I’m another 15 pages in or so. I’ve got a 2 yr old, 2 dogs and a newborn – so not a lot reading time at home. I was able to bring the books bench metaphor into play, mainly due to a post on how to be a [tag]digg[/tag] power user. After reading the post and seeing the number of diggs, 1224, I got to a wonderin. What is genuine in this whole social media thing and how do you filter through the content and self-promotion. So I thought about the Bob book. I actually started thinking about this post a couple of weeks ago when I read [tag]John Scalzi[/tag]’s post on How to Annoy and Irritate People in the Name of Blogging.

The book uses the bench outside of the [tag]Royal bank[/tag] in this small [tag]Ontario community[/tag] as essentially a ranking system of where you are in the scale of things in the community. Being on the bench represents making it essentially. The concept of qualifying for the bench is being legendary and legendary is not so much a legend, more like do you have a Don Quixote thing going on. A passion, some stories and some friends who respect your passion and stories.

So I went to thinking about – what is the online bench? Where is it that the cool people hang and do so out of earning the spot. I quickly realized I don’t know where that is, so I started thinking about personal or social network benches. I also realized the inclusive nature of social networking and social media almost makes it impossible for a bench to exist, but I’m an optimist – so I keep thinking about it.

So is it google hits in a query? Pageviews? People following you on [tag]Twitter[/tag]? [tag]LinkedIn[/tag] connections? [tag]Feedburner[/tag] readers? Gosh I hope it’s not feedburner readers, because my 23 readers are probably not that interesting. These seem like benchmarks, more so than benches, so I would offer that it’s none of the above. Why?

Let’s use 21st citizen as a use case. 21st century citizen on Twitter who is following me and now out of courtesy, for now, I’m following him. I did go to his blog – nice ads! Everywhere! It’s the low bar of “click and add” which makes it difficult to justify the stuff of legends. This creates just a real noisy twitter environment, so here are 21C’s metrics:

• Following 7,568
• Followers 6,666

I have a sum total of 16 people I’m following and just can’t keep up, some folks just have too much time or people posting on their behalf. My checking on twitter 3-4 times a day is becoming like that first IM sign on after vacation. You sign on Sunday night and get the deluge of all those offline messages, which are no longer important. So what do you do with 7569 people worth of tweets?!?! I’ll acknowledge that it is possible that 7569 is the stuff of legends and could qualify for the bench. Just need to figure out where the bench is.

There are similar “friend flewsies” on nearly every network I’m on – so if links, views and metrics don’t do it, what does? I think it’s the transition to the real world. Who calls you and who do you call? I had originally thought email might be the winner, but I audited my outlook address book and I have numerous people I have never talked to, but sent email and many people who are contacts, not friends. So your phone address book seems as close as possible from a metric driven bench.

So maybe I’m doing this this whole social media thing wrong. Maybe I should just link, add, nudge and poke as many people as possible or whatever a given network kitsch action is. Nah, just doesn’t feel right. I’ll just continue to attempt to post fairly meaningful stuff, not so meaningful, things of interest and just see what happens.

Then again, maybe the real benchmark is the number of Viagra emails I get, if that’s the case I think I win and have found the internet bench and earned my right to sit outside the internet Royal – guess I have to sign up for [tag]second life[/tag] and create a bench.

November 10, 2007 by
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Meeting Maxims

So I have this quote in my relevant quotes slideshows:

If you had to identify, in one word, the reason why the human race has not achieved, and never will achieve, its full potential, that word would be “meetings.” – Dave Barry

So I got to thinking – what makes a meeting productive? so i have the four maxims on having effective meetings. Very often meetings end up being general discussions, rather than action oriented or goal driven. To avoid that, just try and not be part of the problem, we can’t impact other peoples’ meeting modes, only our own.  So I thought I would put some meeting maxims together.  Let’s just synchronize on maxim:

max·im [mak-sim] –noun
1.  an expression of a general truth or principle, esp. an aphoristic or sententious one: the maxims of La Rochefoucauld.  2.  a principle or rule of conduct.

So here are my  4 meeting maxims:

Manage the meeting: the management of the meeting starts at the invite. Identify attendees that can drive to closure the purpose of a meeting or those that need briefing. During the meeting address the agenda and begin the meeting on time and frame expectations, the situation and the goal of the next N# of minutes.  Provide background material and context in the invite.

A Single Item: Have meetings with a single purpose.  An Update meeting, literally only updating on activities. Have a session on a single decision, not the follow on concepts or tactics. Often meeting drift into next steps, additional topic extensions and general scope creep.  A single topic scenario:

Should we Pursue Project X?

The decision/purpose of the meeting is the pursuit of the project, not the tactics or plan. Don’t meeting creep into what to do on project X, keep it to what you should pursue –  why, who and how is a different meeting.

Stay Topical: Meetings are not a social event, while I know it may make the meeting more interesting, but the water cooler, cube chatter and general hallway drive-by’s should be used for catch up and trivia. If you stay focused, you may get done ahead of time and be able to get back to the business and avoid a time killing event

Have the [tag]Meeting[/tag]:  Bring your opinions, facts and willingness to engage and contribution to the discussion.  Very often meetings, don’t really happen.  I mean everyone shows up, or you start late or you go off topic and ultimately you need another meeting, on the same topic.   Have the meeting also means, don’t have a meeting after the meeting about how much the previous meeting didn’t meet expectations or express exceptions not voiced during the meeting.  Best to just have the meeting once.

So this is how I look at driving productivity from a meeting, just an idea.

November 1, 2007 by
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